Vision

The UC Berkeley Library employs strategic practices, used for over 150 years, that have created one of the world’s leading research and cultural heritage collections of scholarly resources. We select, collect, curate, and provide access to the diverse and unique resources needed to support current research and instructional programs at Berkeley; to enable scholars to use materials in keeping with their needs; and to preserve resources for future generations. We collaborate and partner with UC Berkeley campus departments, other UC campuses, the California Digital Library, and other institutions and organizations to provide support to research throughout its lifecycle. We are committed to advancing open access enterprises, open educational resources, open source partnerships, and digitization initiatives.

The UC Berkeley Library, like our peer research libraries, looks for strategies both to create budget sustainability and to improve scholarly resource-related services. This often requires the balancing of research and instructional interests and methodologies with changes in publisher formats and business models. Strategies include selecting resources in a variety of formats mindful of both content and usability; evidence-based selection; consortial acquisition and licensing; building collaborative partnerships for both collection building and access; leasing; interlibrary borrowing and lending; and commercial document delivery.

2. Achieve a sustainable budget that supports research and teaching at Berkeley, in the face of current budget reductions, ever-increasing costs, and the campus need for new types of materials.

In FY 2017-2018, respond to the immediate budget reduction by shrinking the scholarly resource expenditures by $1M.

In FY 2018-2019 and FY 2019-2020, re-balance budgetary expenditures in order to embrace new formats, to remediate collection gaps, and to support research needs in light of the evolving budget climate.